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Mellon Foundation Higher Learning Program

2026 Higher Learning Program Portal

New Requirement: All applications for this internal competition must be submitted via InfoReady. You can sign in using your Net-ID and your @stonybrook.edu email address. Please allow sufficient time to familiarize yourself with the portal prior to submitting your pre-application. Pre-application requirements are listed in the announcement below. Submitting by proxy? If you would like someone to submit an application on your behalf in InfoReady, please follow these instructions to designate them as your proxy. Please note: Issues may arise and could negatively impact the review of an application if a proxy is not officially designated in this manner. 

The Office for Research and Innovation, the Office of the Provost, the Office of Advancement and the College of Arts and Sciences invite applications to the Mellon Foundation 2026 Higher Learning Program which supports research and/or curricular projects focused on "Unruly Intelligences" or "Normalization and Its Discontents". Stony Brook University may submit THREE applications. 

Please see below for details. If you are interested in applying, you must submit a pre-application via the 2026 Higher Learning Program Portal in InfoReady by Friday, November 14, 2025 at 9 am.  Pre-applications for internal review and selection must be uploaded to the portal as a single PDF document. 

WHAT DOES IT FUND:  In the interest of maintaining a grantmaking portfolio that supports inquiry into issues of vital social, cultural, and historical import, the Higher Learning program at the Mellon Foundation invites eligible institutions of higher education to submit ideas for research and/or curricular projects focused on either of the two areas listed below. Projects should engage teams of scholars and/or students, and have visible, enduring impact at the institution. Applications must be demonstrably grounded in the humanities and led by humanities scholars. Experimental methodologies, interdisciplinary and community collaboration, and pathways to informing campus and/or wider policies and practices are welcome. The two topical areas for the call are:

  • Unruly Intelligences: Projects might investigate: the meanings of intelligence; the effects of different conceptions of intelligence on (or their emergence from) democratic processes, human subjectivities, probability and prediction, and aesthetic and cultural taste; the social and cultural impacts of specific forms of AI, as seen through discrete analytical or disciplinary lenses (such as disability studies, gender and sexuality studies, environmental justice studies, and ethnic studies); or any of the above, using comparative analyses that address how computational and non-computational understandings of intelligence take into account, for example, attention, dignity, embodiment, expertise, faith, justice, pleasure, serendipity, and surprise.
  • Normalization and Its Discontents: Projects might investigate: comparative historical, geographic, and/or cultural treatments of the normal; normalcy and political contestation; the import of the normal within specific disciplinary approaches; the unspeakable, the taboo, and other deviances surreptitiously produced by a norm; or potential relationships between the normal and the utopian

APPLICANT REQUIREMENTS: The Principal Investigator (PI), or applicant, must be a faculty member and/or dean in a program or department in the humanities or humanistic social sciences at the applicant institution. The PI may also be the institution’s provost/chief academic officer.

AWARD: $250,000 to $500,000 for up to 4 years

SPONSOR DEADLINE: Registration forms (required) due December 1, 2025; Applications due February 17, 2026

A complete pre-application should comprise of the following:

  • List of PI and Co-PIs and their departments/programs
  • Project Concept Note (no more than 1,000 words) which describes your ideas for a potential project, including specific activities it might involve. The note should clearly state the project’s goals, its potential impact, and the fitness of the institution and/or network for the proposed work.
  • Budget Estimate and Description (no more than 1 page) which should provide a list of the types of expenses the grant would fund – e.g., stipends, course releases, fellowships, on-campus or community programming, workshops, etc.
  • CV for the Principal Investigator (PI) (no more than 2 pages)